POCL, the Portable Computing Language project, aiming to provide a portable OpenCL implementation for usage against different CPUs and back-ends, has been working on CUDA support.

There is now an experimental NVIDIA CPU back-end making use of the LLVM NVPTX back-end and CUDA driver API. So far this experimental back-end is good enough for running some OpenCL programs via POCL on CUDA.

This is a very interesting project especially with NVIDIA being slow to implement new versions of OpenCL. Recently we have seen their drivers pick up a bit more OpenCL 2.0 support, but this CUDA back-end could allow for running new OpenCL features not otherwise supported by their native OpenCL driver. This back-end can already handle SPIR/SYCL code too.

Those wanting to learn more about this new CUDA back-end for POCL can do so by visiting PortableCL.org.

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 10,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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